Arne Duncan schooled in limits of power

Arne Duncan brought the most ambitious reform agenda in years to the Department of Education — and a determination to use every lever of power to accomplish it.

The results were stunning: In barely a year, more than 100 state laws were passed to open public schools to competition and set tough new standards for students and teachers. Duncan won allies on the right and the left, becoming one of the few Cabinet members with bipartisan support.

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But the agenda he began to advance in 2009 has now hit serious roadblocks, highlighting the limits of federal power over education. States are balking at reforms they pledged to implement in exchange for grants and waivers from federal law. An unprecedented $5 billion intervention in the nation’s worst schools has yielded incremental results, at best. A noisy opposition to Duncan’s reforms has emerged — and it only grew noisier this month when Duncan dissed “white suburban moms” for opposing the new Common Core academic standards because the tough tests made their kids look bad.

To top it off, there’s no clear evidence that Duncan’s prescriptions are boosting student achievement, though his backers say it’s still too early to tell.

Duncan still has plenty of ambition; he’s taking up several bold — and controversial — initiatives aimed at transforming higher education. Yet as his signature K-12 programs hit speed bumps, his legacy as a reformer is very much up in the air. Among the ways his reach has been limited:

— Duncan shrewdly dangled incentives to convince all but four states to adopt common academic standards meant to raise the bar for students. But he has no power to force states to adopt associated tests that the federal government has spent $350 million to develop. At least seven have dropped out and others are on the fence; analysts fear that without the tests as a common yardstick, states will be free to quietly lower the bar that Duncan has tried hard to raise.

— He successfully prodded states to start holding educators accountable for increasing student test scores in hopes of raising the caliber of the teaching corps. Yet Washington has no sway over how principals rate teachers on other factors — and in state after state, the new systems have yielded the same results as the old, with some 95 percent of teachers rated effective. Other states, meanwhile, haven’t even finished designing the new evaluation metrics or merit pay programs they promised Duncan.

— Even his latest campaign, a PR push to bring more elite college graduates into teaching, shows the inherent limitations on Duncan’s power. He has called for years for school districts to pay their best teachers six-figure salaries — yet he has no way to make that happen, and very few districts have adopted such lavish merit pay scales.

Duncan has been creative in exercising federal power. He dispensed billions in grants under the Race to the Top program and dished out exemptions, known as waivers, to the No Child Left Behind law to states that followed his prescriptions for reform.

The goal, spokesman Stephen Spector said, was to push states to take “aggressive” steps that will raise student outcomes in the long run. He said much has been accomplished despite the limitations on the department’s authority — limitations that he termed appropriate, given that education has traditionally been a state and local responsibility.

Genial, earnest and very tall — he played professional basketball overseas — Duncan has been a highly visible member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. He’s traveled to 48 states so far, holding town halls, talking with teachers and pressing governors of both parties to get serious about education. Aides say he never slows his pace.

Duncan has “gotten more done than any secretary in recent memory,” said Charles Barone, policy director of Democrats for Education Reform.

Critics, however, say his strategies have been shortsighted, even naive. States are backing away from promises they made to secure grants and waivers; just this month, Arkansas said it couldn’t stick to its timetable for improving student performance or raising the quality of its teaching force. In most cases, the secretary has little leverage to make states uphold their pledges. In a ritual that strikes even some bureaucrats as absurd, he has begun granting waivers to his own waivers.

“In 2009, Arne was the new sheriff in town, with big boxes of ammunition and a shiny new gun,” said Frederick Hess, an education analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Now, it’s later in the movie and he’s all out of bullets and he’s trying to scare states by shaking a stick at them.”

States are rebelling in part because of a frustration with perceived micromanagement from Washington. Duncan has often said that he aims to be “tight on goals but loose on means,” but state officials have a hard time squaring that with his department’s prescriptive approach to reforms, such as its insistence that graduation rates count for 20 percent, rather than 15 percent, of high school ratings in Arizona.

“There’s been a mistrust of states wanting to do the right thing,” said Christopher Koch, the Illinois state superintendent. His is one of just a handful of states that has not received a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act, in his case because Illinois law requires that tough new teacher evaluations be phased in a year slower than Duncan would like. “We’re a bit frustrated,” Koch said.

Spector, the Duncan spokesman, said the department “has worked hard and steadily to be a good partner with states and districts, offering them as much flexibility as possible to be creative and innovative.”

Indeed, this month, the department responded to states’ complaints about heavy-handed federal oversight by giving them more autonomy. But in a sign of the fraught politics of education, the move was promptly blasted by civil rights groups that fear Duncan is easing up too much and compromising gains for poor and minority students.